


Season's Greetings

by themegalosaurus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Christmas, College, Gen, Phone Calls & Telephones, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 07:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17219456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus/pseuds/themegalosaurus
Summary: Can't a guy wish his brother happy Christmas?





	Season's Greetings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quickreaver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quickreaver/gifts).



> A teeny tiny chilly little festive fic for QR and the rest of the saltmates. Sorry it's not strippers (on this occasion).

Sam’s woken by the buzz of his phone, vibrating over the surface of the desk. He looks at the screen but it’s not a number he recognizes. His stomach drops.

“Sammy,” says Dean as Sam presses the call button. His voice is slurring and there are voices in the background, lots of them.

“Are you in hospital? Did something happen to Dad?”

“Wha’?” says Dean, and then the background noise grows a little quieter. “What?”

“What is it? What happened?” Sam says. “Is Dad hurt?” His throat twists tight. “Are you?”

“No,” says Dean. “I was just. Can’t a guy wish his brother happy Christmas?”

Relief washes over Sam in a great tide which turns almost immediately, setting his skin prickling all over with an uncomfortable adrenaline fizz. Of course. Yeah. Of course it’s Christmas Day.

“Sorry,” Sam says. “I just thought--”

“Yeah, I get it. Why else would we call you, right?”

Right. Right? It’s not like Dean’s managed to pick up the phone at any other point since Sam walked out the door, Dad’s final words stuck sharp between his shoulder blades. Not once during the whole disorienting orientation, the rollercoaster fear of being found out for what he is; a hunter, a freak-- a fraud. Sam’s packed up most of himself into an imaginary curse box that he guards more closely than the real-life pistol hidden under his bed. It’s exhausting. He spent most of the last couple years with Dad fighting to be himself. He hadn’t thought that it would turn out to be even more difficult here.

Sam’s been waiting for Dean to call for the last three months and that now his brother’s on the line, he doesn’t know what to say.

There’s a long silence.

“So,” Dean says eventually. “Christmas in California, huh?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “It’s, uh, it’s warm.”

“All right for some. We’re in Nebraska. Snowed six inches last night. It sucks.”

Sam knows, with a certainly so absolute that he can feel the chill, that Dean is close to freezing right now. The motel he’s in will have a broken heater; chances are that it’ll have been broken deliberately by a cheapskate owner who doesn’t want to pay the bills. He and Dad will be sleeping in their jeans and boots, scuff marks on the sheets under blankets stolen from the last few stops. When they wake up in the morning their breath will mist in the bedroom air, and the metal of the guns, unwarmed, will stick to the tips of their fingers. They will be drinking whisky; a lot of whisky. “Fire in your belly,” Dad will say.

Once, Sam and Dean spent Christmas in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Bismarck. It was 5 degrees outside and the insides of all the windows that weren’t already broken and covered in cardboard had frozen so thick that they hadn’t been able to scrape it off. They’d both ended up wearing every piece of clothing they owned; torn, threadbare, bloodstained, outgrown, all of it in musty layers until they were both of them Stay-Puft plump. There had been no electricity in most of the house; no TV. When it got too cold for their fingers to hold the playing cards, they’d zipped their sleeping bags into one and lain together in the dark beside their single two-bar heater, jabbing elbows and bickering and waiting for Dad to come home.

He’d finally made it back on the 28th, a gash in his side and his insides steaming hot into the icy air.

“You, uh, you get a lot of gifts from your new friends?” Dean says.

“Oh, yeah.” To be fair, Sam did get one. The coffee shop where he works ran a secret Santa and some kid who he’s staffed with on a Tuesday night bought him some reindeer-patterned socks.

If Sam had known that Dean would be in Nebraska for Christmas, he could have sent them on. For Dean’s feet. You can’t-- it’s hard to focus when you have cold feet. And God knows what Dean and Dad are hunting up there.

“They must all be pretty rich, I guess.” Dean sounds almost wistful.

“Well,” Sam says. “I guess.” Rich enough that most of them hadn’t thought twice about signing up for the ski trip that’s running over New Year. Sam had looked at the $600 price tag and totted up tips in his head for about .5 seconds before throwing the flyer in the trash. It’s for the best, anyway. He needs the time to get ahead on next term’s reading. Working two jobs makes it difficult to keep up and Sam is behind in so much already. Coming here, he’d thought he’d at least fit in intellectually, but the more classes he takes the more conscious he becomes of the patchwork, piecemeal nature of his knowledge, cobbled together over dozens of schools and states. That’s leaving aside the pop culture stuff. He feels like he’s running just to stand still.

The money thing can be useful, though. His roommate, Brady, is so embarrassed by Sam’s obvious poverty that Sam can seamlessly deflect almost any line of awkward questioning by a mere allusion to his scholarship or the fact that he needs to work to pay most of his bills. That’s how he’s got away with this Christmas break. Brady thinks Sam’s at some distant aunt’s house in San Gregorio but only for the day itself. “Gotta get back early to cover my shifts,” Sam had told him. The suggestion had been enough to turn Brady pink and embarrassed. “I get it, man,” he’d said. “I mean--”

He doesn’t get it. How could he? And Dean, Dean doesn’t get what Sam’s life is now, what it’s like to be surrounded by these smiling strangers, safe in their world without wendigos and demons and death.

“Well, that’s good,” Dean says.

“Yeah.”

The silence expands.

Sam doesn’t say, where in Nebraska? He doesn’t say, I don’t think I can do this. He doesn’t say, right now I would give anything to be freezing my nuts off in a shitty motel while Dad yells at me for the tenth time that day.

“Happy Christmas, Dean,” he says.

“Happy Christmas, Sam.” Dean clears his throat. “I’m, uh. You did the right thing, man. I’m happy for you.”

He hangs up mercifully quickly. Sam doesn’t have to stifle his tears.

**Author's Note:**

> I love to hear your comments!


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